I consider this a feature, not a bug. IMO, it's good to let older conversations just kinda "run out of steam" as attention moves elsewhere. In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion. I don't see any value in making it easier to sustain that.
In my experience, the "hot takes" are often low quality comments. Quality comments take time and thought, and HN isn't conducive for that.
That said, notifications of themselves ... probably aren't that. Though there might be ways to tweak the mechanic to induce this.
Google+ had a Notifications dynamic that seemed to work well in this effect, though it was somewhat specific to how that site was structured:
- Notifications were for specific discussions.
- Disucssions were hosted by a specific user.
- The Notification went out to all (recent-ish) participants in the discussion.
- Discussion hosts could moderate the thread. This was a two-edged sword, but tended to reduce spam and flamebait when used well.
- The Notifications Pane itself wasn't merely a "something happened" nag, but a site element where new comments could be directly responded to.
- Discussion threads were flat, with most-recent comments appearing at the bottom of the thread. I'd at first missed the threaded style, but came to appreciate a flat disucssion which didn't descend into long separated exchanges (frequently flamefests), and for which each subsequent response was an equal contribution to the thread.
- Total thread length was limited to 500 replies.
It's not the same as a topical or open-discussion formum, as with HN. But as a conversation-fostering platform given the right host and participants it could and often did work quite well.
A result was conversations which evolved naturally over days and weeks, sometimes months and years. Conversations didn't simply die.
Perhaps HN could add a /topconversations or /yesterdayconversations link that only highlights the best conversation threads from 24 hours ago. That way attention on good discussions could be maintained for an extra day.
That said, it still won't highlight conversations which have come back to life.
That tends to happen even when there are notifications in my experience - it only takes one participant to stop.
> In my experience, extended discussions here tend to be unproductive flame-war level discussion.
As in here on HN? That can hardly be due to notifications since there are none. I'm also not looking for extended discussion, just being able to see if someone has something to add to an old comment of mine.
I’ve certainly felt that was happening here a few times. I’m glad the “threads” list is so short, because I’m not immune to the siren call of https://xkcd.com/386 even though my better self wishes I were.
I'm saying notifications would exacerbate those situations, which is why it's good that HN doesn't have that facility.
Like, I "owe" people a response here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30310575#30310784
I am trying to put some degree of effort into the answer, but it feels like they might not even see my responses to their comments.
They thought it'd make a good blog post too, so you can repurpose it for that?
But I have been thinking about making one, maybe this can kick it off. Would have to be anonymous until I successfully make it back into tech.